Making Fitness-Focused Yoga For Men | Dean Pohlman | Better Man Podcast Ep. 026

Hey, guys, it’s Dean. Welcome to the Better Man podcast. Today’s episode is a solo episode, so I mentioned in a couple of episodes ago that we will be doing more. That I would be doing more solo episodes moving forward. And this would be focused on a lot of the questions that I tend to get with Man Flow Yoga in general.

Obviously, the Better Man podcast is separate from Man Flow Yoga. It is an extentsion and in a way, I think that Man Flow Yoga, well, I don’t think that, but Man Flow Yoga is mostly physical fitness focused. I think there’s a lot to learn in there. In terms of mental wellbeing. There’s obviously a lot of nonphysical benefits that come from practicing Man Flow Yoga that we’ve heard a ton from, from from our members. But the Better Man podcast is kind of part of the idea of Man Flow Yoga. I think that part of, part of why I’m so interested in fitness is because it helps you become better. It’s just part of what goes into being healthy it helps you sharpen, sharpen the sharpen those saws, sort of speak in terms of just making you more capable, in terms of making in terms of helping you with your productivity, in terms of helping you be healthier, of teaching you things that translate into the real world.

So anyways, I just wanted to kind of make that connection between the Man Flow Yoga and the Better Man podcast before I move on, because I don’t want this podcast to just be me talking about whatever I want. I want there to be an idea behind it. And so I just wanted to establish that really quick.

All right, so this podcast is going to focus on my story with how I got started with yoga. I’m going to talk about how Man Flow Yoga evolved from there and kind of what Man Flow Yoga does now and in terms of what we specifically do to make it more helpful for guys and also how we’ve made it kind of an alternative to mainstream yoga in terms of the non inclusion of spirituality. And I’ll get into all of that and it kind of came up because we are launching, we’re launching a new ad basically this week and whenever we launch new ads to an audience that doesn’t already isn’t already familiar with Man Flow Yoga, we get, you know, those people who I’ll call them yoga trolls because that’s what they are, but we get the people who just don’t agree with the way that, you know, with what we’re doing with Man Flow Yoga, they don’t like that it’s made for men. They don’t like that it’s not spiritual. So it always brings up, you know, the idea of why does Man Flow Yoga exist to begin with and why do I believe in it and how is it helping tens of thousands of men?

So we’re going to get into that in a second.

But first off, I do want to start by just replying to the emails and the feedback that I had from my last solo podcast episode about getting back on track. I heard from a ton of people who have who are going through currently or have gone through that same process or that same feeling of just not being where they want to be, not feeling like they have the typical focus or just feeling great, or feeling as good as they want to. People who have had difficulty getting back to where they were, reestablishing habits that they know work for them. And I’m really glad that I can let you guys know about my experience with that because hopefully it makes you feel like you weren’t going through that alone. And I also want to point out something that I think is important, which is I didn’t feel badly for sharing.

I didn’t feel bad sharing that with you. I didn’t feel shame around it. I didn’t think that something was wrong in the sense that it was it was never going to get better. I knew that this was just part of the process of getting back at things that, you know, you’re not always going to be at your best. You’re going to have periods where you’re just not feeling great. We’re not as productive as you normally are. And so, you know, I wanted to kind of explain my process behind that. And and I am really feeling I will say that, you know, compared to where where where I was sort of speak a couple of months ago back in July after I had COVID, I am in a much better place.

And I and I shared a lot of that process with you in my previous solo episodes. So listen to that. If you if you want to check back in with that but one big part of that was just having faith that I would make it back and and having faith not in any sort of organized religious sense, but just having faith because I knew I would get back to it because other people have gone through the same thing and then I’m not special and that, you know, if, if I’m going through it, then there are probably millions of other people who have gone through the same thing.

So if you want to learn more about that concept, by the way, I found “the subtle art of not giving a fuck” by Mark Manson to be a really powerful way to kind of understanding that mentality and helping it in, applying it in a way that was helpful.

So and the other thing that that surprised people from that podcast was that I have back pain. So, yeah, you know, while admittedly this is a bit embarrassing, for somebody who has designed some really effective programs for a leading back pain, and that’s a big reason why I do Man Flow Yoga myself. This is just something that happens regularly. When you work out, you’re going to have little and you know you’re going to have little tweaks now and then that make it difficult to exercise.

So I will be actually explaining this full process how to kind of deal with exercise while you’re injured and some mindsets that you should embrace because, you know, all of us are going to go through it. And I think that there’s a good way to get through injury. And I think you know, there’s a bad way to do it, which is just feeling bad for yourself, not doing anything and just lamenting what you can’t do. And there’s a better way to do that that’s going to help you feel better but also help you recover more quickly, too.

So I’m going to be covering that in my next solo podcast. So be on the lookout for that. If you are looking for an immediate guide on that. I do have something in the Man Flow Yoga App and members area which talks about how to approach working out while you’re injured. So you can check that out in the Man Flow Yoga app and members area. If you’re not already a member, you can get a free seven day trial at ManFlowYoga.com/join. All right, so let’s get into this episode.

Why does Man Flow Yoga exist? So again, we just launched some new ads for our Strength Foundation’s challenge. And whenever we launch a new ad and we talk demand for yoga, we talk about Man Flow Yoga to an audience that isn’t already familiar with Man Flow Yoga. We get a lot of people coming out who who strongly disagree with what we’re doing, mainly because it just doesn’t fit their ideal of what yoga is. And I you know, I totally I totally understand where they’re coming from.

I mean, I get it, Man Flow Yoga is not typical yoga. But, you know, I don’t think there has to be a either or one can not exist while the other survives situation, you know? No, I’m not forcing anybody to do Man Flow Yoga. And by me doing Man Flow Yoga, it doesn’t make your yoga practice any different. It’s just we’re doing things differently and we’re getting what we want out of it.

So anyways, let’s, let’s so that whole brings up the, that all brings up why Man Flow Yoga started in the first place. So, you know, that kind of starts with my story. Of how I got into yoga if you haven’t heard this yet. So basically in 2011 I was a collegiate lacrosse player so you know, I was doing a lot of the typical workouts that an athlete would do in lifting weights, doing conditioning drills, lots of sprinting, you know, jumping footwork. I was obviously practicing lacrosse, doing shooting drills, you know, all of that stuff and I wandered into a yoga studio on during that period. I was home for four winter break and I wandered into a yoga studio, literally stumbled into a yoga studio while I was looking for the tailor, trying to get my pants fixed. And I stumbled into a yoga studio and I was actually on my way to the gym after that.

So my plan was to drop off the pants and then go to the gym. And I was in the yoga studio and they were about to start a class, I think, in the next 15 minutes. And I had always wanted to do yoga. There was something about it that intrigued me. I actually vividly remember being in one of my, you know, being in one of my friend’s apartments in college, and I was saying, You know what? I’d really like to try yoga sometime and so I was there at the yoga studio. I was like, Let me try this. And I asked them, would this help me as an athlete? And they said, Oh yeah, it’s definitely going to help your core strengths. Are going to help your balance, it’s going to help your flexibility. And I said, OK, whatever, let me, let me give this a shot.

And then they also said, you don’t have to wear a shirt. And I was like, Oh, so cool.

So so anyways, I was, I was, I was there and I was going to give it a shot. And quite honestly, I wasn’t. I think the reason I don’t know if I would have gone to a yoga studio on purpose back then. Yoga in 2011, just culturally where we were with, with how we perceived yoga was a lot different than what it is now 11 years later. So, you know, I don’t think I would have wanted to have gone to a yoga studio just because it was not something that that was cool back then. I don’t know if it’s cool or not now. I think it’s cool, but you know, back then it was just not something that I that I wanted to do. I actually remember my friend inviting me to go to yoga once, maybe a few months before that, and I was like, No way, dude, I’m not going to yoga.

So anyways, I was in the class and you know, it’s super hot. I did this is Bikram yoga or hot yoga, as it’s called. And halfway through that class, I thought that I was on Punk’d. It was, that was, that was and still is the hardest workout that I’ve ever done. And halfway through that class, you know, I’m standing there drenched in my own sweat. There’s, you know, the towel beneath me is just like, I don’t even know if I had a towel, but there’s like there’s a there is a puddle of sweat beneath me. I’ve been pushing myself super hard, and I’m only halfway through the workout. I was totally drained. And it was in that moment that I realized, wow, I am not as strong as I thought I was.

So there were just so many different movements that were part of that yoga workout, part of that series. That exposed all these weaknesses that I didn’t know about. You know, so something that I hadn’t done at all in my other workouts was isometric strengthening, you know, holding poses for an extended period of time. We also didn’t do any balancing or static balancing postures where you’re standing on one foot and just holding it. There also wasn’t a lot of focus on flexibility. The emphasis was on strength and speed and endurance. And my other workouts and this workout was focused on you going deeper into a pose. So there were just so many aspects of my fitness that I wasn’t covering with my other, you know, more traditional workouts. And that just made me realize, wow, I have got a lot to learn from from this yoga workout.

So I started going to yoga. I think I went six times per week and yeah, doing Bikram yoga classes two days in a row. It was tough for multiple days and all was really tough. And then I kind of branched out and I found Vinyasa Yoga, which is which really it means flow. But you know, Vinyasa or Power Yoga really strongly depends on the instructor. You could get anything from a Vinyasa or a or a power yoga class. Some of them might be more focused on breathing and stretching. Some of them might be more strength focus. So it’s really a mixed bag and it depends on the studio and the instructor when you’re doing Vinyasa Yoga.

But then I started to learn other poses and I just kind of immersed myself in that yoga world, and I was doing 6 hours, six, sometimes even seven sessions per week. And I took advantage of a lot of the free week yoga classes. Most yoga studios will give you a free week where you get to go try stuff out or it’s, you know, an introductory offer of some sort like 30 bucks for the week instead of, you know, $25 for a class or something like that. So anyways, I tried out a lot of different yoga and I, and I was, I was exposing myself to these different movements and I was learning new exercises and it was great because I was working on strength and new ways I was working on my flexibility for the first time, challenging my balance in different ways, learning more about, you know.

So anyways, I was doing a lot of different movements, but during those workouts there was a, there wasn’t much emphasis on technique. So, you know, I was, I was looking around like, like everybody else when they go to a yoga class, for the most part, you’re looking around at what other people are doing. You’re kind of just mirroring what other people are doing. You’re not really you know, you’re not really at least in my experience, there’s not enough instruction to really understand what you’re supposed to be doing in each pose. And that’s you know, that’s, that’s, that’s not the fault of the yoga instructor or the yoga studio because number one, if you’re a yoga instructor in a studio, it’s tough to go around and, you know, if you got like 30 people in the class, it’s really tough to go around and make adjustments to everybody. But secondly, yoga as it is in the studio mostly is not meant to be just fitness. It’s also, it’s, yoga is an experience when you’re at a yoga studio. So you know, they’re there they’re providing an experience.

There’s the community element there. There’s also, you know, the, the room, the environment creates part of that. So it’s not purely a physical fitness thing. So my experience with that left me wanting more focus on the pose technique because I was doing the poses, but I just didn’t know how I was supposed to be doing them. You know, I didn’t know where my knee should be. I didn’t know where I should be feeling a stretches. I also didn’t know how to modify the poses because I was a you know, I was I was a pretty muscly 21 year old when I started doing yoga. Lots of strength work, not a lot of flexibility work. So I just I wasn’t as flexible as the other people in there, not to mention that you know, I’m a guy and men are less flexible than women.

So, you know, I just, I wasn’t getting the focus on technique that I wanted. I also wasn’t learning the I also wasn’t learning what the benefits of the poses were. I kind of wanted to know, like, what is this doing for my fitness? I wanted some explanation. I wanted to learn and there was also, you know, as you’re doing these stretches, as you’re doing the poses, there’s also the introduction of some spirituality or some kind of spiritual guidance as you’re doing it. And I can understand I mean, that’s what that’s what yoga is. Yoga most yoga does include. That’s that some talk of that. You know, it depends on the class. It depends on the instructor. Sometimes you’ll get, you know, chanting at the beginning. Sometimes you’ll get the instructor will feel inspired to, you know, give you some some spiritual guidance, like midway through the midway through the session. Maybe there’s maybe they’ll do some chanting on their own.

So anyways, there was that, too. And for me, there’s something I mean, if that’s if that’s what you want out of yoga class, that’s that’s great. But for me, I was there because I really wanted to improve my fitness. I wanted to get stronger as an athlete. I wanted to work on my flexibility, to work on my strength in new ways so that I was improving my performance and also minimizing my risk of injury. So for me, the spiritual aspects of it, I just that just wasn’t what I wanted to get out of the workouts. So when I started to when I started looking for so anyways, that prompted me to kind of start looking for other types of yoga. I was trying to find more physical fitness focused yoga or maybe yoga that was more made for men.

You know, I kind of at the time, I just made the I just made the assumption that most men wanted to work out and do yoga because they wanted the fitness benefits from it and they wanted a non spiritual experience. They wanted a really good workout not to say that that’s not what all men want or that’s even what most men want from yoga, but that was my assumption at the time. Keep in mind, I’m a 21 year old college dude who plays Lacrosse, OK? So I made a lot of assumptions or not made a lot of assumptions, but that was kind of my assumption at the time that most men wanted the workout out of yoga so I was looking for kind of a more male, male, focused, maybe athlete, focused, physical fitness focused type of yoga.

And there wasn’t really anything. There wasn’t really anything. I couldn’t find anything, honestly. So I, I decided that I was going to I was going to start teaching my lacrosse team yoga. So I actually started recording workouts and I needed somewhere to put those workouts because I wanted them to be able to do them on their own. I was, I was the conditioning coach for my lacrosse team at the time, and I wanted somewhere to put those workouts so they could easily wash them.

And there was this thing called YouTube back then. Actually, I only had a ten minute limit on the videos at the time, so you had to upload in chunks rather than uploading the full video. Now you can do 10000 minutes or 10000 hours. You can remember how long anyways so I recorded workouts, terrible lighting, terrible instruction. I barely knew what I was doing, but I recorded workouts and I uploaded them to YouTube and I had to come up with a name for them.

So I initially tried “Bro Flow Yoga” because I just thought that was a really funny name. And then I got a really nice cease and desist letter from another yoga company. They’re like, Well, this is too similar to ours, so would you be able to change it? And I was like, Yeah, sure, whatever. So I changed it to Man Flow Yoga, and that’s what it’s been. So I started adding YouTube videos to this channel called Man Flow Yoga and the original goal there again, I wanted my lacrosse guys, my lacrosse teammates, to be able to do workouts over winter break. But I also wanted I wanted to kind of make a statement to to men that, hey, I am, you know, I am what what the typical I want to say that how do I phrases I am kind of I kind of look like what the guy who is working out is striving towards, you know, I just I’m that’s what I looked like.

That’s the reality of it. I mean, I looked like an athlete because I was an athlete. And so here’s a guy who’s in good shape who’s working out and he’s using yoga to help make himself stronger. So I kind of wanted to just put that image out to the world and say, hey, guys, yoga is really good for you. It can help you get better at your other workouts. It can help you improve your performance. It’s also going to help you with just feeling better in general because you’re actually focusing on flexibility and stretching and recovery. And so I wanted to put that out because it had really helped me and I wanted other guys to be able to experience that.

And and so that’s that’s that was kind of the goal with me. And for yoga, I wanted to put that image out and trying to make yoga more acceptable for guys and so I started upload it, sending out videos, putting out videos. And, you know, if you actually go back and look at some of my earlier yoga videos, like early, early, early yoga videos, you’ll kind of see that they’re much different from what they are now. They were kind of much more of a traditional yoga. I think I did use I used some of the Sanskrit names when I was doing that, when I was making those videos, I think they might have flowed a little bit faster there wasn’t as much emphasis on technique.

So, you know, they were they were kind of more similar to what you would see in a typical yoga studio. And then as I kind of became more serious with what I was doing for yoga, you know, I graduated college. I got a I got a different job. You know, I got a job in just a third party with just a sales company. I was just basically sitting in an office and making cold calls all day.

By the way, if you’re curious about what I studied in college, it was not business. I studied, I triple majored. I had Middle Eastern studies, languages and cultures of Asia, and history. And admittedly, a lot of those a lot of those disciplines intermingled with one another. It wasn’t like I was taking three times the classes, but I had I had worked at the US Embassy in Turkey. The the the year before that, I had spent I had actually had multiple trips to Turkey. I was fluent in Turkish I got what’s called a critical language scholarship to study abroad in Turkey in the summer of 2010. And then I went back and studied as a as a, as an exchange student at Bogazici University. So I was, I was, that was my kind of goal was to work with the US government somehow.

And I had even, even before that actually in college I had initially accepted a four year scholarship with the, with the Army ROTC program. And I got through my first year of that and I just I wasn’t feeling it. I was like this just I don’t think this is for me. I’m just a little more self-directed. So anyways, that was my background in college. And so I couldn’t find a job in what I studied.

I took this other job and I really didn’t like it. I hated it actually. And at the after about six months of doing that job, I came to a point where I accepted another job. So I quit the job that I didn’t like to accept that other job. And then that other job offer fell through. So I was I was in a position where, OK, well, I don’t have a job right now. I don’t have any prospects for a job that I like. But what I do have is this YouTube channel and a Facebook page, so maybe I can do something with that. And so I started advertising webcam training with with men for yoga.

And that was when I first learned that I wasn’t going to be training a bunch of other 21, 22 year olds who wanted to get jacked with yoga because that’s initially what I was. That was the message that I was initially putting out. I was like, If you want to get jacked, then try Man Flow Yoga, you know, which looking back now, I can understand why that wouldn’t be that, you know, the most accept accepted message just in terms of, you know, yoga on its own is, is a yoga on its own is, is not the best way to get jacked. I think you should be doing weight training and yoga, but also like who’s, who’s doing yoga to get jacked, you know.

But anyways, so where was I? I’m losing myself. So I realized at that time and then I started working with people that I was going to be working with guys who were in their fifties. That was those are the people who are reaching out to me. It wasn’t guys in their twenties. And and then I started to learn more about their experiences with yoga, and they had a similar experience to me in the sense that they weren’t as flexible. So they had trouble nearing the poses. They also didn’t want the spiritual aspects out of the workout. Nothing, nothing wrong with it. They just didn’t want it. They didn’t want to do it. And then they were also there was also this there was also kind of this sense of people who weren’t ready to do a more intense form of fitness. So they were looking for something that was lower impact, maybe more gentle on the body, something that would help prepare them to do other workouts.

And so that’s what Man Flow Yoga evolved into it. It evolved as a type of yoga that was better suited toward men’s lower levels of flexibility. And I’ll talk about that in a minute because it’s not just gender related there’s lifestyle. There’s there’s lifestyle that goes into that. It also evolved as a non spiritual form of yoga or, you know, we can even just call it, you know, to avoid having any sort of debate here, we could just call it a form of fitness. If we don’t call it yoga, then, then fine. It’s called Man Flow Yoga. That’s what it is. Name’s not changing, but I can understand why you would say that Man Flow Yoga is not yoga. And I would also agree with you there, Man Flow Yoga is not yoga and I’ll get into that more and then also what men weren’t, I talked about that, but what men weren’t getting from yoga and what they were looking for.

So anyways, let’s talk about the first portion, which is Man Flow Yoga being designed for men. So the first part of that was making sure that there were poses and modifications that fit the average guys flexibility. And also keep in mind, most people who are doing Man Flow Yoga, the the younger ones are in their forties. Most guys doing Man Flow Yoga are in their fifties and sixties. And then there’s also guys in their seventies and even eighties doing Man Flow Yoga. So there’s there’s limited flexibility just just due to biological gender, men are just not as flexible as women. Men did not evolve to give birth. So joints are different and just overall flexibility levels are different.

The other component of that is there are sedentary there’s sedentary lifestyles to consider. So, you know, yoga, many of the poses, many of the original poses of yoga came about thousands of years ago. And most of them were focused on being able to sit in a seated meditation, right? Being able to sit in that lotus or cross-legged position with one leg stacked on the other. So a lot of those poses were geared toward preparing the body to be able to do that for extended periods of time. And then there were also many introductions of poses later on through the six, seven or eight, nine century when you started to get into tantric yoga. And then in the 19th century, there was actually a lot of influence from British gymnastics into what we now consider as general yoga.

So the sun salutation wasn’t invented until the 19th century. There’s, you know, there’s this idea that there’s a yoga on, on a mountain top doing a sun salutation in you know, first century or even before the first century. And that’s just not the sun salutation didn’t exist. So a lot of what, you know, people understand as yoga, as historical yoga didn’t actually come about until the 19th century or the 20th century. And it’s a combination of of Indian martial arts, of physical fitness training, of British gymnastics and of traditional or early, early traditional yoga.

So the point of me saying that is that many of these postures required a different level of flexibility. And because we live in an age where most of us are sitting down at a desk or many of us are sitting down at a desk, if we’re not at a desk, we’re sitting in a chair, we’re driving somewhere, we’re just not moving as much as we used to, which means that we don’t have as much flexibility and so there needs to be different poses, different modifications of those poses so that if you do have limited flexibility, you can still do these poses in a way that works for your body and not get hurt.

So that’s the big consideration is that men are just not as flexible. And there’s also the biological differences to consider. So men have different men and women have different centers and gravity men tend to use their upper body more women tend to use the hips and core more. And this also leads to men and women practicing differently. So doing yoga poses differently, so men tend to make different mistakes than women. You take a good example of this is boat pose. If you ask a your typical female to do a boat pose and you ask your typical guy to do a boat pose, you’re going to see some pretty dramatic differences even if they’re in really good shape. So the reality is that just most men now are less flexible and they need different poses and modifications of those poses to help them.

The second big component of Man Flow Yoga is the non spiritual aspect. And you know, I don’t want to get into too much of a debate here because, you know, I understand if you’re looking at a traditional definition of yoga that you can’t say that yoga is non-spiritual. Most yoga is spiritual. Man Flow Yoga is not spiritual, it is what it is. It’s fitness that’s inspired by yoga, but it also includes body weight exercises and physical therapy influences to make it as effective as a workout as it can be.

And the the other thing to consider is that yoga has become much more popular in the last couple of decades. And because of that, there is actually a secondary definition of yoga that probably didn’t exist a hundred years ago. And if you can look it up, look at Merriam-Webster now, look at a dictionary, and you’ll see that the secondary definition of yoga as a system of physical postures breathing techniques and sometimes meditation derive from yoga, but often practice independently, especially in Western cultures, to promote physical and emotional well-being.

So there is so there is a secondary definition of yoga. If the question becomes is Man Flow Yoga, yoga or not, it doesn’t really matter what the answer is. Man Flow Yoga is what it is. Man Flow Yoga is not spiritual so that is that is one of the big components of it. And that’s not to say that we don’t find the spiritual, you know, that we’re neglecting spirituality entirely. A lot of people who do Man Flow Yoga are are religious and they practice their spirituality in other ways. And personally for me, I, I don’t follow you know, a particular discipline, but I do have a, I have a spiritual practice in the sense that I am trying to make sense of my place in the world that I, I, I do believe in something and that I, you know, that that I, I understand and can kind of feel the sense of universal oneness. That is, you know, what a lot of religion is focused on.

But the point is, I don’t do that in my Man Flow Yoga workouts. I focus on the fitness aspects. So we’re just kind of to bring up the point that, that most yoga isn’t meant to be purely physical fitness. You know, there’s, there’s a big difference between there’s a big difference between a typical yoga class and Man Flow Yoga. And I don’t think I need to go into too much detail. But again, the reality is that Man Flow Yoga is focused on fitness, and that’s what we focus on.

The kind of the cool thing about that is that there are a lot of non physical benefits that come with Man Flow Yoga that are just happen as a result of the way that it’s done. So when you are focused on your breathing, when you’re focused on your body, when you’re pushing yourself, when you’re immersing yourself in the workout, there are a lot of nonphysical benefits that come from it. We actually have tons of people when we, when we ask our members about, hey, like what are you getting out of these workouts? What has it’s helping you.

One thing that we hear regularly is that, yeah, my, my whole day is different depending on whether or not I do Man Flow Yoga in the morning just because of, again, the way that those workouts are what they do for you in terms of focusing on your body, focusing on your fitness, focusing on your breathing, forcing you to be in the present, to actually practice being in the present, not talking about being in the present, but actually being in the present because you’re focused on your body, focused on your breathing, focused on just those movements and those little nuances of what happens if I change my knee here. OK, let me press down through my foot. Let me be aware of what my neck is doing because of all those things that go into it. There are also a tremendous amount of non physical benefits, nonphysical benefits or, or non fitness or non performance benefit that come from it.

You know, when you’re when you’re doing we’ve had, we’ve had a really cool somebody actually posted about this last week on our Facebook group, but after doing we just launched a new challenge called the Breath Series 28 Day Challenge. But after doing this Breath series for multiple weeks, I think for two and a half weeks or so, their overall their resting heart rate had dropped by eight, by 10%. And in addition to that, they were also taking two fewer breaths per minute. So there and when you do that, there’s a whole host of benefits that come from that. There’s less stress on your body. You’re going to sleep better. You’re going to have better focus, you’re going to have less anxiety. There are all these things that come from, you know, from from from that. So again, the cool thing is that it’s not just physical performance. There are also a lot of non physical performance benefits that just come from the way that you’re doing it.

So and that’s why those are that’s what makes Man Flow Yoga different and that’s why Man Flow Yoga exist. And this has been, you know, proven to help tens of thousands of guys and and maybe even more you know, if you’re counting, you know, all of the DVDs that I’ve sold through my body by yoga programs on Amazon, if you’re looking at the I think we sold over 40 or 50,000 copies of my book, Yoga Fitness for Men.

Yoga for Athletes came out last year. And that’s also very popular I mean, if you look at the YouTube channel and the Facebook page, Facebook has over 100,000 likes. The YouTube channel has over 360,000 subscribers so you know, if you’re looking across all of those and considering all the people who have consumed that content, then this is something that’s helped tens of thousands of guys and I get emails and messages and reviews all the time that say, I’m so glad that Man Flow Yoga exists because I couldn’t find a type of yoga that worked for me. I wanted they either wanted a non spiritual form of yoga or they wanted a yoga that would better fit their body as a typical inflexible guy. Sometimes with both of those, it usually is both of those at once. So this is something that’s really helping a lot of men all over and I’m truly grateful that, you know, this is this is something that I that I do on a day in and day out.

That’s you know, not only allows me to live kind of the lifestyle that I want to live, but it allows me to spend my day helping other people with something that I’m really passionate about. This is something that that I would be doing. I would still be working out like this and still, you know, I’d still be working out that they’re still practicing yoga like this, whether or not this was my job. But, you know, it’s just a kind of a bonus that I get to do it and help other people experience the same benefits. That that I experienced when I was first starting yoga. And even now, you know, I continually learn about my body and learn how to improve things. So anyways, I don’t need to go into that too much, I don’t think.

But the bottom line here is that, you know, there are some reasons that make Man Flow Yoga unique for what it is, whether or not it’s called yoga. I don’t think it’s I don’t think it matters. It is what it is. And what we’re doing is really helping people. And I’m really proud of that. And, you know, again, some people disagree with it. I understand why they disagree. You know, whenever you see something that threatens your understanding of something or your worldview, then it’s natural to attack it. But, you know, on the other hand, I’m not forcing anybody to do Man Flow Yoga. I’m also not trying to dramatically change the, I’m not trying to change what yoga means, Man Flow Yoga is different from yoga.

I’m trying to I’m just trying to provide an alternative. Hey, if you don’t like the way that typical yoga is, you can try Man Flow Yoga instead because it’s what works for a lot of guys. It’s kind of what works for me.

So be on the lookout. We’re going to be doing more of these solo podcasts in the future. Again, in the beginning of this episode, I talked about our next episode, my next solo episode, which is going to be two weeks from now, and I’m going to be talking about injuries in that and how to approach fitness while you’re injured, how to work around injuries, how you can have a better mindset. And then next week we’re going to be having a guest come out.

So the plan, at least right now, is to release a solo episode every other week and do an interview with a guest every other week, every other week as well. So we are into season two of the Better Man podcast. I’d highly recommend you go back and check out some of the previous ones if you haven’t already and if you haven’t already left a review on the Better Man podcast, you can do that on Apple podcast, on Spotify, I think you can do it on Google too. Wherever you listen to a podcast. And if you you know, if this if this is really helping you or if you just want to give me some feedback, you can email me at [email protected] or talk about it in our in our if you’re a member, you can talk about it in our Facebook group, the Man Flow Yoga Community on Facebook, which is our members only group.

And I’m excited to be able to do this. I’m also excited that I’m feeling better again and feeling, you know, able to do this because I definitely was not feeling up to doing this two months ago and I’m excited to talk about things that I know you guys are interested in. So that’s pretty much it for this episode.

Guys, thanks for tuning in. I hope this is helpful. I hope this inspires you to be a better man. I hope this inspires you to keep doing Man Flow Yoga if you’re already doing it. And if you’re not already, you can always get started with a free seven day trial at ManFlowYoga.com/join thanks for watching and I hope to hear you. I hope to see you or hear you listen to you be listened to on the next episode of the Better Man podcast. Bye guys.